Kobe
After the previous day’s long haul Madam’s detailed research paid off big time with a leisurely morning, a midday checkout time and no appointments until the evening.
I kept plugging away at the email mountain, a slow process since most of it was only accessible through Telstra web-mail, which is hardly the speediest of conveyances.
From the 28th floor of the hotel, which is located on the western edge of downtown Kobe, we had a view away across the long narrow city wedged between mountains to the west and the Inland Sea.
Once the preliminaries had been completed and the suitcase packed, it was time for a brief review of the options for the next hour or two. Basically this amounted to a choice between going straight to lunch at the German bakery or working up an appetite by taking a stroll around the interesting houses in an area just beside the hotel (but on the southern side, our outlook was to the north) which was, however, a bit hilly.
Bearing the jobs that needed to be carried out later on in the day (chiefly laundry and other chores, but they had to be done) in mind, I thought that walking up hill and down dale would take up time that could be more profitably spent getting these other activities out of the way, so my preference was for an early lunch.
Once we’d left the hotel and surveyed the adjacent topography I was sure I’d pulled the right rein since the slopes leading to the interesting houses, while not quite vertical were, at the same time, not all that far off it.
The German bakery (Freundlieb) is located in a converted church on a quiet back street a short walk away from the hotel. There is a downstairs retail section, which we walked straight past, and a stylish cafe on the first floor where we ordered the Monday sandwich special for ‘Er Indoors (soup, salmon and vegetable sandwich, drink and ice cream for 1080-yen) and a roast beef sandwich (1600-yen) for me. If I’d been on the ball I could have ordered a half bottle of Valpolicella to go with it, but the sun wasn’t quite over the yard arm so I opted for a cappuccino instead.
Both meals were substantial enough for a satisfying brunch though Madam claimed she was having difficulty tasting the salmon in hers.
With brunch out of the way we rolled back to the hotel, collected the luggage from the cloak room and boarded the subway, Myodani-bound. A quick taxi transfer took us to The mother’s place, where a quick report on our activities over the previous week was followed by a rearrangement of luggage for the next couple of days (Kobe > Kyoto > Nara > Kobe).
Having arrived at Kansai Airport with two large suitcases, we’d transferred to one (mine) for the Kobe > Kanazawa > Takayama > Nagoya > Hakone > Kitakami > Kobe leg we’d just completed but, figuring we only needed a couple of changes of clothes for the next three days we packed what we thought we’d need into a smaller overnight bag and headed back downtown to the night’s hotel.
The casual observer might be puzzled by these frequent re-locations, particularly when we were staying in Kobe.
So, initially, was I.
Once on the ground, however, things made a bit more sense.
The first night in Kobe had been somewhere to crash after the flight, a place with a good view, an easy transfer from the airport shuttle to the hotel, and, most importantly, a substantial smorgasbord breakfast. Most of those factors were irrelevant for the rest of the stay, and the location on the edge of the harbour was a little out of the way.
And ‘Er Indoors had found a good deal for the one night.
The second place had been chosen for ease of transfer to and from the train to Osaka, remembering our return was probably going to be rather late.
The third spot gave easy access to trains to Kyoto (both the local service that delivered us into the Kyotic cherry-blossom Sunday and the shinkansen that was the first leg of the big loop journey.
Once back in Kobe, we’d stayed right next door to Shin-Kobe station for Sunday night, close to somewhere we could eat and more or less on the way to The Mother’s place.
And where we were headed for the night might have been a fair step from Sannomiya station but offered a substantial Viking breakfast which we thought would be handy in terms of the following day’s travel plans (in other words we probably wouldn’t need to eat until the evening).
Once we’d booked in for the night it was off to meet Gomi-san and Sakai-san (or so we thought, a late email en route to the rendezvous advised that Sakai-san was a late scratching) and once we’d arrived at the building, it was a case of into the lift, up to the 28th floor, and negotiating the important matter of free drinks for the night.
Actually, the use of the term free drinks is misleading. There was a one-off charge (1200-yen for males, 900-yen for females) but any bloke who can’t manage to knock over a bit over twelve Australian dollars’ worth of grog in three and a half hours doesn’t qualify as a serious drinker.
Faced with a choice of beer, sake, basic spirits and wine we decided to stick with the wine, where there was a selection of four reds and four whites (Rosemount Estate Jigsaw labels included) and out of the Italian and Californian wines we tried there was nothing to match the quality we’d come to expect at around the Rosemount Jigsaw price point.
Dinner was another Viking affair and, while it wasn’t the greatest spread I’ve ever seen there was plenty to eat and quite good value for money.
Having eaten, we sat around chewing the fat and savouring the sangiovese that we’d agreed was the pick of the non-Oz wines on offer until the management called Time and we decided to draw stumps and decant ourselves into the darkness.